Need a better understanding of PBS.

M

mouse51180

New Member
Dec 10, 2025
16
1
3
I have two Proxmox environments at two locations.

Site A has has a PBS VM storing the backups to a Synology NAS device.
Site B is just now coming online and I was going to try and link it to Site A's PBS server, but it looks like I can backup Site B to a Synology NAS that is at that location with no PBS server involved.


Looking at Site B...it seems I could have setup backups the Synology NAS that the PBS is currently using without actually needing the PBS VM in the middle.

So my question is... why would I need the PBS server? Is it really only needed if your are trying to backup to a physical server and not a NAS location? I dont really see anything the PBS is doing that the regular backup task isnt already doing.
 
Its a trade off. You don't necessarily need PBS to do backups. But backing up to a NAS is generally slower and takes up more disk space than backing up to PBS. However, restoring from a NAS is much faster in my experience than restoring from PBS. It all depends on your priorities. Also if you run PBS as VM on the machine you are backing up you run additional failure risks. I run PBS as an Incus container on my NAS. You would likely be better off running it as a VM in Synology.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Johannes S
The PBS in my environment is on a 3 cluster node...so it can HA if its host fails so I dont think moving it onto my single host Synology would be a better option then what I have now.

Im still not super sure what the PBS offers that the regular "backup" option does not.
 
Deduplication. When I back up all of my VMs to my Synology, it takes up almost a TB of space. When I backup to PBS, it only takes 170GB. Also since it used deduplication, backups are incremental, and happen way faster. I have less time and CPU cycles spent on backups with PBS, and I can do more frequent backups since the take less time ad less disk space.
 
  • Like
Reactions: UdoB
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back